This eccentric bunch of bickering Bohemians are far from a cosy clan, but their feuds and crises make for hilarious reading
Up to the age of 12 or so, I tended to sort the families I encountered through reading into two categories: those I’d like to belong to, given the chance, and those I really wouldn’t. Retrospectively, the impulse isn’t particularly hard to fathom: the child of divorced parents myself, when it came to fiction, I was in the market for stability; the families I fell for were those in which arguments were rare, parents reliable and an unshowy bedrock of love a given. Into the first category, then, went the Marches in Little Women, the Carrs in What Katy Did – and, less piously, the Stantons in The Dark is Rising and the Harrisons in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. The second played host to the likes of the Wormwoods in Matilda, the Strorm family in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, and the aggressively dysfunctional parents in Diana Wynne Jones’ superb Fire and Hemlock, who are, by turns, indifferent, neglectful, selfish and emotionally vampiric (over the course of her career, Jones turned out a fine line in screwed-up families, having been a member of one herself).
Of course, there were books that resisted such categorisation; books (many of them) in which the children are orphaned or in which other environments replaced the familial (Enid Blyton’s school stories spring, alas, to mind), but by and large, the system worked. I could appreciate the drama unhappy families generated, but I couldn’t relax around them; much as I might love the books in which they figured, the family interludes themselves induced a kind of queasy panic. This held true right up to the point at which I came across the Bagthorpes.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment